"Aldous Huxley - The Doors Of Perception" - читать интересную книгу автора (Huxley Aldous)

Martha and raises it, so to speak, to its own higher power. Mescalin opens up the way of Mary, but
shuts the door on that of Martha. It gives access to contemplation - but to a contemplation that is
incompatible with action and even with the will to action, the very thought of action. In the intervals
between his revelations the mescalin taker is apt to feel that, though in one way everything is supremely
as it should be, in another there is something wrong. His problem is essentially the same as that which
confronts the quietist, the arhat and, on another level, the landscape painter and the painter of human still
lives. Mescalin can never solve that problem; it can only pose it, apocalyptically, for those to whom it
had never before presented itself. The full and final solution can be found only by those who are
prepared to implement the right kind of Welranschauung by means of the right kind of behavior and the
right kind of constant and unstrained alertness. Over against the quietist stands the active-contemplative,
the saint, the man who, in Eckhart's phrase, is ready to come down from the seventh heaven in order to
bring a cup of water to his sick brother. Over against the arhat, retreating from ap- pearances into an
entirely transcendental Nirvana, stands the Bodhisattva, for whom Suchness and the world of
contingencies are one, and for whose boundless compassion every one of those contingencies is an
occasion not only for transfiguring insight, but also for the most practical charity. And in the universe of
art, over against Vermeer and the other Painters of human still lives, over against the masters of Chinese
and Japanese landscape painting, over against Constable and Turner, against Sisley and Seurat and
Cezanne, stands the all-inclusive art of Rembrandt. These are enormous names, inaccessible eminences.
For myself, on this memorable May morning, I could only be grateful for an experience which had
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shown me, more clearly than I had ever seen it before, the true nature of the challenge and the
completely liberating response.
Let me add, before we leave this subject, that there is no form of contemplation, even the most
quietistic, which is without its ethical values. Half at least of all morality is negative and consists in
keeping out of mischief. The Lord's Prayer is less than fifty words long, and six of those words are
devoted to asking God not to lead us into temptation. The one-sided contemplative leaves undone many
things that he ought to do; but to make up for it, he refrains from doing a host of things he ought not to
do. The sum of evil, Pascal remarked, would be much diminished if men could only learn to sit quietly in
their rooms. The contemplative whose perception has been cleansed does not have to stay in his room.
He can go about his business, so completely satisfied to see and be a part of the divine Order of Things
that he will never even be tempted to indulge in what Traherne called "the dirty Devices of the world."
When we feel ourselves to be sole heirs of the universe, when "the sea flows in our veins ... and the stars
are our jewels," when all things are perceived as infinite and holy, what motive can we have for
covetousness or self-assertion, for the pursuit of power or the drearier forms of pleasure?
Contemplatives are not likely to become gamblers, or procurers, or drunkards; they do not as a rule
preach intolerance, or make war; do not find it necessary to rob, swindle or grind the faces of the poor.
And to these enormous negative virtues we may add another which, though hard to define, is both
positive and important. The arhat and the quietist may not practice contemplation in its fullness; but if
they practice it at all, they may bring back enlightening reports of another, a transcendent country of the
mind; and if they practice it in the height, they will become conduits through which some beneficent
influence can how out of that other country into a world of darkened selves, chronically dying for lack of
it.
Meanwhile I had turned, at the investigator's request, from the portrait of Cezanne to what was
going on, inside my head, when I shut my eyes. This time, the inscape was curiously unrewarding. The
field of vision was filled with brightly colored, constantly changing structures that seemed to be made of
plastic or enameled tin.
"Cheap," I commented. "Trivial. Like things in a five-and-ten." And all this shoddiness existed in a
closed, cramped universe. "It's as though one were below decks in a ship," I said. "A five-and-ten-cent
ship." And as I looked, it became very clear that this five-and-ten-cent ship was in some way connected
with human pretensions, with the portrait of Cezanne, with A.B. among the Dolomites overacting his